Pike wrote:
Look at the UK for instance. Since you outlawed handguns back in 97 your murder rate has gone up.

Can you give me some statistics to back that up? I can't find a decent set of stats tracking murder rates in the UK in the past ten years, but I do know that the BCS has recorded a massive drop in violent crimes and property crimes since the late nineties.

In total, serious crime has fallen 48% since 1995, with domestic burglaries down 59% and violent crime down 48%. Vehicle theft is down 69% in that time. Crime had been swiftly rising since the start of the eighties, before turning around in 1995 - we're now back down below the 1980 levels.

I don't have figures for murder specifically (annoyingly the ONS website is having a bad database day), but it would be rather odd if every other kind of violent crime had fallen but murder had risen...

(I'm not saying that the gun ban is the reason behind this fall in crime - correlation doesn't imply causation. I'd simply like to see what figures you're using to support your assertion.)

Was it just last week that an analysis of crime in the EU found that the UK had four times as much violent crime as America?

No, it was a couple of weeks ago - and it was thoroughly debunked, leading to the report's authors having a right old whinge about how the newspapers had mis-reported the data. The report just compiled the statistics from various countries and presented them in a table - it wasn't trying to accurately compare them to one another. British newspapers took that as their cue to breathlessly report that Britain is one of the most violent countries in the world.

You'd think that they'd smell a rat when the figures suggested that not only is Britain more violent than America, it's also more violent than South Africa...

The figures were skewed because of the different criminal justice systems in each country. Britain, for example, records "affray" - which can be as little as someone pushing someone else during an argument, or even just acting in a physically menacing way towards them - as a "violent crime". The majority of other countries don't count anything below GBH in their violent crime statistics. Our crime stats also count events that only resulted in a caution and/or the filing of a report, while other countries don't count crimes towards their statistics until a prosecution is brought.

The report was misleading (although in its defence, it did actually point all this stuff out in the report text), and the UK's papers, as usual, shamelessly used it to create a sensational "zomg crime!" headline. More violent than South Africa? Really? REALLY? My arse.